It hasn’t even been a year since Salesforce Manufacturing Cloud was released, but that has not stopped Salesforce from enhancing it and adding new features. The upcoming Summer ‘20 release set to go live in July will introduce Account Manager Targets as a new feature, as well as enhancements to Account-based Forecasting, Sales Agreements, and Reporting.
For those of you who don’t know, Salesforce Manufacturing Cloud is an industry-specific product for manufacturers. Manufacturing Cloud aligns sales and operations to create a unified 360-degree view of the customer. This brings an all-new level of business visibility and collaboration with features like Sales Agreements and Einstein Analytics. Check out more information on the Manufacturing Cloud here.
Account Manager Targets
This is the place to go to set your team’s New Year’s resolutions. You can set goals for your team regarding revenue, quantity, etc. with Account Manager Targets. Once you set the targets, you can distribute them to the team, allowing specific target percentages per team member. Managers can further distribute targets by account or product and time period.
Since a business can rapidly change, managers can easily readjust targets and propagate assignment. If you have a team member no longer with your organization, you can easily reassign that target to another user.
Furthermore, the Account Manager Target tracks all goals, goal distribution, and progress. All targets related to a single account can be viewed on a single page on the account record. Here, users can view all team assignments and assigned targets in the Account Manager Targets tab.
On the back end, Salesforce Admins can configure Account Manager Targets specifically to your organization. They can define distribution frequency by monthly, quarterly, or yearly. They can also define the team hierarchy. The manager hierarchy can define the team hierarchy, which can be set at a user level or existing forecast hierarchy. Note that these hierarchies are not based on the account team.
Salesforce has talked about introducing account manager targets for Einstein Analytics in a future release. This would provide further insights and a roll up of completed targets for managers to view.
Enhancements to Account-based Forecasting
The Salesforce Manufacturing Cloud update for Summer ’20 also includes enhancements to Account-based Forecasting, including improved forecast accuracy and attainment and better real-time visibility. Organizations can better focus on key accounts and products by creating a list view and only forecasting on the account and products in that list view.
Salesforce additionally implemented new limits to improve managing your forecast data volume with visibility into usage. The number of account product period forecasts records are limited to 9,000,000, account forecast recalculations to 52 and account forecast regenerations 4. There is also now the flexibility to recalculate forecasts on demand and more quickly with multi-fold forecast performance improvements.
Enhancements to Sales Agreements
Users can now easily manage sales agreements across regions, including multi-currency support. The accounting currency conversion calculates the actual amount. This includes both standard and advanced currency support.
Enhanced Reporting Support
Reporting enhancements support Account Product Period Forecasts and Sales Agreement Product Schedules for generating granular reports. There is also reporting support for all of the account manager’s target objects.
A Look into Future Releases
Although nothing can be confirmed for certain, Salesforce has talked about new features and updates that might be coming in future releases. Salesforce might be looking into piloting a rebate management and partner loyalty feature into Manufacturing Cloud. They have talked about introducing site visit planning to help manage requirements to visit accounts based on business rules and assigned tasks. They are also looking to improve Einstein Analytics for Manufacturing cloud through improved target vs. actuals along with rebate analytics and insights. Salesforce is also taking into account enhanced predictive capabilities and What-If scenarios in rebates.
Salesforce has not confirmed or denied anything on this list, but it does look like they will keep making major improvements to Manufacturing Cloud.
Have any questions about the Salesforce Manufacturing Cloud update for Summer 2020? Please contact us at any time!
